Revisiting the Photon-Drag Effect in Metal Films
Optics
2019-08-07 v3
Abstract
The photon-drag effect, the rectified current in a medium induced by conservation of momentum of absorbed or redirected light, is a unique probe of the detailed mechanisms underlying radiation pressure. We revisit this effect in gold, a canonical Drude metal. We discover that the signal for p-polarized illumination in ambient air is affected in both sign and magnitude by adsorbed molecules, opening previous measurements for reinterpretation. Further, we show that the intrinsic sign of the photon-drag effect is contrary to the prevailing intuitive model of direct momentum transfer to free electrons.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1812.01673,
title = {Revisiting the Photon-Drag Effect in Metal Films},
author = {Jared H. Strait and Glenn Holland and Wenqi Zhu and Cheng Zhang and Bojan R. Ilic and Amit Agrawal and Domenico Pacifici and Henri J. Lezec},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.01673},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
12 pages, 4 figures